The kids’ daycare is closed for 2 weeks for Christmas break. The week before Christmas I had them all by myself, so I planned a variety of Christmas themed activities for the kids to do. On Monday I took them to the local library to hear stories read by Mrs. Claus and then after naps we did some gingerbread math problems and decorated a gingerbread house. I bought the gingerbread house from Target pre-built as well as the containers of candy.

Using the bag of icing provided the kids stuck on the candy to their desire. They told me where to put the candies and I squirted out the icing.

This is the side Ian decorated.

and here is Jensen’s side, I may have helped Jensen a little…

Jensen got distracted by the icing that kept getting on his fingers and the mini M&Ms.

Attempts of taking a photo of them smiling with their completed house was not successful 🙁

Mr. Amusing rents lenses to see if it’s something he would like to add to his collection and if it will add value. It’s up to me to find places besides our local parks to test that lens out. One of these times I took the family to the Heard Museum, which is a wildlife and natural science museum. They have the Dinosaurs Live! exhibit right now through 2/19/2017, probably because it’s winter and all the wildlife is dead so this is a way to get customers in.

They also have some animals you can see and lots of paths to walk. Our kids just wanted to play in the Pioneer Village of little playhouses. Instead we forced them to walk one of the shorter trails first before allowing them to run amok in the play village.

I thought the below image was so sweet, brotherly love, then I looked closer and Ian is trying to lick Jensen…

The many faces of Ian, all silly of course.

After heading home and taking some naps, Mr. Amusing herded the kids outside to take some pictures in the front yard to capture that sunset lighting.

Mr. Amusing and I went to Austin to watch the F1 race. Our first ever trip without the kids, we left them with my parents and drove to Austin. I have never been to the race before, but Mr. Amusing has. He went the first year it was at Austin’s Circuit of the Americas track back in 2012. I didn’t go that year because Ian was only a couple of months old at the time.

He told me a lot has improved since he was there 4 years ago. That first year the food choice was limited to hot dogs, when we were there it seemed every food truck from Austin was there as well as brick and mortar concession stands.

So Friday and Saturday are all practice days, not only is the F1 race going on but there are other races as well. There was a Porsche and Historic, which is older model F1 cars no longer racing, race as well. The race track isn’t actually in Austin, it’s about 30-40 minutes out of town. On day 1 the crowds are very minimal, this is the day you want to buy any souvenirs, the inventory is limited and by actual race day most of what you would want is sold out.

There were cut outs of the drivers near the entrance so we took some photos with them.

Louis Hamilton, he has won the race here 4 times!

Jenson Button, our Jensen may or may not be slightly inspired by this Jenson.

Sebastian Vettel, Mr. Amusing originally wanted to name Ian, Sebastian. We settled on Ian.

Day 1 also let Mr. Amusing take his time with taking photos around the track at different vantage points. We had actual seats in the stands, but since day 1 is practice day you can familiarize yourself with the track.

Even though it was mid-October it was still very sunny, so hat and sunscreen was a must!

That evening we wandered around downtown Austin with our friends, who actually came to the race with us as well. We went to Voodoo Donuts and that was really about it. At 10 pm we all declared we were old and tired and went our separate ways to sleep. 🙂

Day 2 was more crowded, but more of the same wandering and taking pictures. At night was the headliner concert and the main reason I went to the race with Mr. Amusing. Don’t get me wrong I like F1, but I was there for Taylor Swift!! We actually went back to our rented apartment and rested a bit before coming back out to the track. The audience changed drastically that evening, instead of middle aged adults milling around it was teenage girls with their moms. The concert was lawn seating, so we actually go to go down on to the track and took a few photos. Taylor Swift has a very strict camera policy so these are cell phone photos.

We ended up choosing not to fight with what seemed like millions of teenage girls for a seat in the grass and went to our bleacher seats directly across from the stage.

Then we sat in traffic for what felt longer than the actual concert itself :/

Then it was Day 3, race day! This was definitely the most crowded day. General seating, which is lawn seating was PACKED. The walk to our seats was very crowded too.

The race was very uneventful and Lewis Hamilton won the race by 4.5 seconds. Still enjoyable to watch and went much quicker than it does on TV. Before the race there was a air display from the US Air force from Fort Hood and a parade which was the drivers on a flat bed waving at the fans.

Mr. Amusing took many photos of the cars racing. Here are two of my favorites.

The feature photo is a great capture of Lewis Hamilton during his victory lap and the British flag in the foreground, as Hamilton is from the UK.

If you plan on attending the F1 race in Austin, I highly recommend staying with a friend or using Airbnb, which is what we did. Saved us tons of money as all the hotels were 2x the normal price and all sold out. Here are a couple of photos of the apartment/loft we stayed at. Pics are kind of dark since we took them in the morning.

If you are interested here’s the link to airbnb room we rented. Not sponsored just passing on knowledge.

So that was a recap of the 3 ish days we were at Austin. Have you been to an F1 race before?

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas! I’ve featured our family photos for this year taken by the talented Lynn Michelle.

Jensen was obviously not excited about meeting Santa at first. When we went to pay for the pictures the actual photo taken had Jensen and Santa’s eyes closed. So we retook them and I told Jensen he could have candy after if he didn’t cry. So this is our first year that both children are not crying.

2016

2015

We didn’t visit Santa in 2013, probably because I was super pregnant with Jensen.

I am trying my hardest to get through all that happened in 2016 before 2016 ends!!

The Dallas Arboretum is a huge botanical garden that is wonderful to take pictures and just walk around. They decorate with the season and holidays, so when we went they had pumpkins and fall flowers everywhere. We actually met up with a friend of ours and their newish baby. Mr. Amusing took this photo and later I told him “that’s exactly what it would look like if we had 3 kids.” I have no idea why Jensen is angry, the hay is probably itchy.

Ian and Jensen ran around like the little boys they are, on top of the hay, in between the hay, climbing pumpkins. Great time for them, also worth noting, we went to the arboretum in late October and it was still 90 something degrees :/

I think they are trying to save each other from falling in the hot lava, not wrestling. They could be wrestling…

I got you bro!

I got a couple non-running photos, but of course both are not looking at the camera.

I had to sadly put away this stars and stripes shirt for the winter, and by the time it’s warm enough for short sleeves he will have grown out of it. Good thing I can make him another one 😉

This is probably why our kids don’t take decent photos, sorry Mr. Amusing it’s all my fault. Hey guess what I made my shirt I’m wearing! The pattern is from Patterns for Pirates and it’s the Everyday Elegance Top.

After rolling around in the hay 🙂 We strolled around the garden and chit chatted about life and enjoyed our time together. It’s always nice to stop and smell the roses. I’m here all week guys!

Mr. Amusing also brought along his macro photography stuff and took some fun shots of bugs and flowers around the arboretum.

The State Fair of Texas runs through the end of September through October. We’ve been going every year since we’ve been married. In fact it was where we went the next day after we got married. I feel it’s getting more and more crowded each year. It’s best to go on a weekday, weekends are super crowded and the corn dog line is extreme.

The DART system has been improved over the years and there is a station super close to our house and takes us right to the state fair gates. Ian and Jensen still love trains so naturally we took the train to the fair. If you’ve studied our pictures closely you will notice Ian has dimples, Jensen has them too but his cheeks are still baby chubby so you gotta catch it. Mr. Amusing just so happened to finally snap a picture of it!

There is always a huge car show at the fair, it was the main reason we started going to the fair before we were married with kids, now we go to eat horribly unhealthy foods and let the kids run around. We still go through the car show but it’s the last thing we do before we go home. This time they had a classic car show too. This particular car is called the Jensen Interceptor with our Jensen in front of it 🙂

Are you as much of a fan of the Stig as this person is?

The best food we had this year was the Down Home Chicken Pot Pie Pocket (with mac ‘n cheese dip). Everything else we had was too fried, this one was good crust and fantastic filling. Obligatory photo with Big Tex! Mr. Amusing hates taking these types of photos and I tell him how else will we remember the times!! I think the kids share Mr. Amusing’s feelings on this photo…

There are of course fair games and the prizes this year were Pokemon! We didn’t play any, I could buy one for cheaper, plus you’d have to carry it around with you.

Ian likes to find random rocks…there are a lot of clean rocks in my house. He puts them in his pockets and forgets to take them out before putting the pants in the laundry. Then the dryer makes awful noises while they are being tossed around. #momproblems

Another cool Prisma altered photo:

I also got a chance to eat my cup! It wasn’t as good as I hoped, it tasted like a stale fruit roll up.

There is an area for kids and they got to create their own spin art. They are standing below their own masterpieces.

Then we saw the cars and headed home and played with Snapchat filters 🙂

I love living in the DFW area there’s everything you need to be entertained. There are many amusement parks, mainly water parks because it gets hot in Texas. But I’m not talking about those today. I’m here to tell you about or fun day at Six Flags Over Texas! So over the summer I started running again. If you remember for father’s day my sister and I participated in a 5k that involved beer. Well in October I signed my other sister and myself up for a 5k that involved roller coasters! This is obviously post race, all the selfies I tried to take pre-race were blurry due to it being dark.

I had been battling a cold the week prior so I couldn’t run, I was really worried I wouldn’t make it without having to stop to cough. Surprisingly I didn’t have to stop to cough, in fact I felt awesome, my poor sister however has not been running like me and wanted to die by the end of the race. The course took us through the park, probably best race to date. My sister and I actually stayed in a nearby hotel so we didn’t have to wake up SUPER early and we wanted to shower. Mr. Amusing and the kids picked us up from the hotel and we headed back to Six Flags.

We don’t have that many pictures, it’s hard to take pictures at amusement parks AND ride the rides. It goes without saying we all had a fun time and we spent most of the time in the Looney Tunes area.

Now Jensen is into roller coasters too. He’ll sometimes ask me randomly if we are going to go ride roller coasters 🙂

One weekend Mr. Amusing woke up early and started cleaning up his car and moved Ian’s car seat into his car. He drives a Ponitac G8 GXP. It’s his 3rd baby. He loves this car because it’s rare and powerful and doesn’t look it.

Quick story about how he came to get this car. He had been searching ebay and craigslist for this car for months, eventually he stopped stalking it for a while, but then one day he was casually pursuing the car forums and saw this particular one for sale. It had low miles and was a great price and it was in El Paso. Not a quick drive at all from DFW area.

He convinced me to allow him to buy this car and he bought a one way ticket to El Paso had the guy that was selling it pick him up from the airport and bought the car sight-unseen. This is by far the riskiest thing he has EVER done. However the car is worth more now than when he bought it, which is amazing.

Ok so after we have eaten breakfast Mr. Amusing says, “ok everyone get in daddy’s car”, which is odd because we always take the mini van anywhere. So we do and he starts driving to the Cavanaugh Flight Museum. We have visited the museum once or twice. It’s very nice airplane museum with lots of historical airplanes. On this particular day they had a special event going on. They had a car show for Pontiacs. In fact when we pulled up one of the volunteers asked if we were part of the show. One of those volunteers is a friend of ours and we had no idea he volunteered at the museum!

They also had one of the planes that flew in Vietnam open for people to go in and take a look around. The best part was the pilot that flew the plane was there giving tours.

They had other things going on as well. Like this super loud drag car thing. Ian did not like this. He complained later that it was so loud it hurt his tummy.

I love going to events like these you never know who you might bump into. I just happened to bump into one of my high school friends that just happened to be in town for the weekend!

But it was all better because he got to sit in the cockpit of this plane 🙂

That’s one happy kid!

The other cool thing about this museum is that you can take a ride in one of these old planes (for a cost of course). During the event they had this plane below take off, which is always fun to watch.

And off it goes.

After we had our fill of automobiles and planes we went to check out some trains. There was an Amtrak event happening over at the Museum of the American Railroad. They had a museum set up in train cars for you to walk through and see how passenger trains have changed through the years. Really makes me want to take a train vacation!

It was very kid friendly, they had two train tables set up and they even gave us 2 free Chugginton DVDs!